Joseph Renzulli and Sally Reis

2010 Brock Prize Nominees

Joseph Renzulli and Sally Reis, a husband and wife team, are internationally known for their work to extend enrichment and differentiated teaching and instruction to all students. Dr. Joseph Renzulli, Director of the National Research Center on the Gifted and Talented at the University of Connecticut, holds the Lynn and Ray Neag Chair in Educational Psychology where he has been a professor for over 40 years. He is a Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor at the University of Connecticut, an award given to only three professors a year from across the University and the medical, law, and dental schools. Sally M. Reis is also a Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor and serves as a Principal Investigator for the National Research Center on the Gifted and Talented as well as a professor in Educational Psychology. Both Renzulli and Reis began their careers as public school teachers.

A fundamental belief underlying their work is that anyone who professes to offer advice about school improvement must have a strong research base. They have written over 400 articles for well-respected professional journals and numerous books, chapters, technical reports, and monographs. They have generated more than 50 million dollars in research funding that focuses on research-supported methods for talent development in all young people. A focal point of their work has been on using enrichment and the pedagogy of gifted education to identify and build on strengths as opposed to focusing on deficits and remedial approaches to school improvement. Renzulli was the first theorist in the country to challenge the sole use of IQ as a way to identify high potential in children. His article “What Makes Giftedness: Re-examining a Definition” is the most frequently cited research article in the world on expanding conceptions of human potential and is credited with opening talent development opportunities for more children of poverty and children from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds.

Renzulli and Reis are pioneers in the areas of differentiation and the authors of the Enrichment Triad Model and the Schoolwide Enrichment Model, a strength-based plan for providing a systematic series of highly engaging enrichment services to all students. For the last 32 years Renzulli and Reis also have conducted Confratute, a summer institute on differentiation and enrichment learning and teaching. Approximately 800 to1,000 teachers and administrators from all over the world attend annually. Renzulli and Reis have won numerous awards, their work has been translated into more than a dozen languages, they have been consultants to every state in the nation, advisors to a White House Task Force, and have worked with thousands of schools and districts in the United States and many other nations. Their most recent book is a popular press guide for parents called Light Up Your Child’s Mind published by Little Brown. Their most current project, sponsored by the University of Connecticut, is an Internet based program that uses computer technology to assess student interests, learning styles, academic strengths, and preferred modes of expression, and that matches high engagement enrichment resources to individual student profiles. This program provides a one-of-a-kind tool for assisting teachers in carrying out truly individualized differentiation.

 

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